Interview with Jackie Flynn: Jackie is an expert in working with families, children, and couples.

Model healthy relationships for your children

When children are growing up they experience how their parents interact with each other, and this is how they learn to interact with others. This your first opportunity to teach your child, people are for loving and respecting and this is how healthy couples interact

Nurture your relationship

If you don’t give your relationship time and attention, your relationship can fall apart.

It is dangerous to be in a child centered marriage. You want to be the best parents, but recognize that being great parents does not need to be at the expense of your relationship.

The emotional distance and disconnect can leave a loneliness in your partner’s heart.

Feeling and fearing loneliness can contribute to people behaving in ways that are against their values.

Feeling desperate for emotional release can open the door for other people to enter your relationship, such as having an affair.

People begin to feel guilty

Signs that you may not be paying attention to your relationship

Look for decline in tolerance level.

During conflict, you focus on every negative thing about the person, or bring up every time the person has acted in a negative way.

A conflict avoidant relationship.

This can open the door to infidelity and other relationship problems.

You have begun to lose the passion.

You begin to engage in the 4 horseman.

Defensiveness, Contempt Criticism, and Stonewalling.

When stonewalling, you check out.

You don’t upset me.

You don’t excite me.

What can I do to make a shift to focus on my relationship?

Carve out time each week to be intimate.

Schedule time with your husband or wife. Get a babysitter

Tell your kids that it’s time to nurture your relationship.

Deposit into partner’s emotional bank account.

Instead of focusing on the negative, say I am glad we are together right now. I am happy to see you.

Go out of your way to show your spouse that he or she is important.

Being a part of a family, with a partner and children, requires balance:

Don’t focus on one and forget the other.

Focus on yourself as an individual.

Make time for the relationship with your partner.

Don’t forget to have the time together as a family.

Your child or children are important; therefore, there must be time for each child.

If you feel like your marriage is in trouble, do something about it as soon as possible. Don’t wait until you feel like “I don’t know if this marriage is going to work.”

Most people wait too long. They seek counseling as one last ditch effort before going to the lawyer to separate.

The counselor will work with you to address, “what does the relationship need.”

Don’t wait. When you catch the problem early, there is much less to fix

The counselor is focused on what does this marriage need.

Bringing problems out in the open does not make the problem worst. It allows you to work on the relationship before an explosion.

Pretending that it is not there can be like a boil waiting to burst and leave a scar.

Therapy can be great for a relationship. When couples go out of their comfort zone, they can become madly in love with each other again. In counseling, you can work to have a relationship better than it was in the beginning.

In a child centered marriage, you grow distant as a couple, because you are not making time for each other. Your child has attention, but they do not get a good template for what relationships are made of, and they will not get the benefits from experiencing a healthy happy family.

A happy healthy family can’t be replaced by money, attention, or anything else. Give this gift to your child.